I can’t really remember when I first learned to blow. Now, before you decide to jump the gun on me here and start slinging out the low-brow trolling and insinuations, just let me explain first. By “blow” I mean “blow into an NES cartridge”. What were you thinking? “Blow into a Caleco cartridge”? No? Well…yeah, wow. That’s much worse.
Now, back onto the subject of oral fixations. I discussed this a while back with a good friend of mine, and henceforth it has me thinking. My good friend Ian wrote a sociology paper for a class about how people almost instinctively blew into NES and other video game cartridges if their game wasn’t working properly; without any instruction by the game companies to do so. It was something that people just did, and on a sociological stance, it’s a thing we’ve handed down from one generation to the next. I don’t ever recall reading about it somewhere, and neither did he. We both remembered seeing a friend do it, and in turn, began to do it ourselves when our copies of Super Mario Bros. decided to show up on the TV screen as a blinking myriad of hot pinks and blues. So, I ask, where did this idea start? Who was the first person to think, “Huh…this thing must be dusty. Time to make out with this sweet pin configuration.”
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